A new report by the Washington Post, published today (Wednesday, Dec. 14) claims that Texas’ virulently homophobic state attorney general, Ken Paxton, in June asked employees at the Texas Department of Public Safety to compile a list of everyone in Texas who changed their gender markers on their Texas driver’s license and other DPS records during the past two years.

Documents obtained by The Post  via a public records request showed that the chief of the DPS driver’s license division sent an email to colleagues on June 30 reading, “Need total number of changes from male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month. We won’t need DL/ID numbers at first but may need to have them later if we are required to manually look up documents.”

DPS spokesman Travis Considine told The Post that after finding more than 16,000 gender marker changes, DPS officials decided they would have to do a manual search to find out why those changes were made.

But, Considine said, DPS officials ultimately told the AG’s office that “the data neither exists nor could be accurately produced. Thus, no data of any kind was provided.”

Considine said the request for the information was made verbally rather than in writing, and, when asked who requested the information, he replied, “I cannot say.”

When asked for records of the request on their end, a spokesman in the AG’s office said no such documents exist, and The Post said no one in Paxton’s office responded to requests for comment.

The Post’s investigation shows that Paxton asked for the information after Texas courts issued injunctions stopping child abuse investigations of families providing supportive health care to their trans children. The investigations were ordered by Gov. Greg Abbott, based on a since-discredited legal opinion by Paxton.

The newspaper also notes that Paxton’s office “bypassed the normal channels — DPS’s government relations and general counsel’s offices — and went straight to the driver’s license division staff” to ask for the information, “according to a state employee familiar with” the situation. That same employee said Paxton’s office wanted “’numbers’ and would later want ‘a list’ of names, as well as ‘the number of people who had had a legal; sex change.’”
Read The Post’s complete story here.

— Tammye Nash